“No model can achieve equal funded rates, equal numbers of grants and equal total funding for women and men at the same time”

The National Health and Medical Research Council has long struggled with gender-imbalance in grants, particularly apparent in its Investigator programme, introduced in 2018, to fund “highest performing researchers” at all career stages.

Over the programme’s three years to date men received 62 per cent of awards.

“The gender disparities in funding outcomes in the Investigator Grant scheme reflect the systemic disadvantage faced by women in health and medical research, made visible by the attrition of female applicants at more senior levels of the scheme. This disadvantage cannot be offset by individual ‘relative to opportunity’ adjustments,” the paper states.

Early this month the council committed to providing options and now it has released a discussion paper, which models outcomes of four options ahead, of open forums next month

I increase structural priority funding from 8 per cent to 20 per cent of the $365m Investigator pool This funds “near-miss high-quality applications” in four priority areas, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health researchers • Women chief investigators • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research • Health services research

Modelling finds no gender parity in number of grants across categories and leadership levels

II as above, plus all research support packages are awarded at the $400 000 max This would not achieve gender parity in number of grants or total funding

III equal grants by chief investigator applicant gender This produced a higher funded rate for women than men at every leadership level, although funded rates were lower for women than men in the two emerging leadership levels, “reflecting their higher application numbers”

IV equal total funding by chief investigator applicant gender The modelling suggests a similar outcome as (III) but for the senior researcher category, it “was unable to resolve the large gender difference in outcomes at the L3 level because of the much larger application numbers from men”

But the NHMRC paper warns, “no model can achieve equal funded rates, equal numbers of grants and equal total funding for women and men at the same time”